Starting out with TeX, LaTeX, and friends

Do you want to be­gin work­ing with the TeX type­set­ting sys­tem? Most
peo­ple start out by down­load­ing free ver­sions of the needed
soft­ware, and a tu­to­rial. This page gets you to the most pop­u­lar
choices.

Step one: Get a dis­tri­bu­tion

You first need a col­lec­tion of the soft­ware. Such a col­lec­tion is called
a dis­tri­bu­tion, and comes with TeX, LaTeX, BibTeX, and ev­ery­thing
else that will help you to per­form TeX's magic on your com­puter. Each
dis­tri­bu­tion also comes with pro­grams spe­cific to your com­puter
plat­form, so make your choice from the list be­low.

Win­dows:

The most pop­u­lar choice here is
the MiKTeX dis­tri­bu­tion, which
lets you eas­ily man­age TeX pack­ages. Many peo­ple ad­vise be­gin­ners to
get the proTeXt bundling of
MiKTeX, which lets you in­stall by us­ing a .pdf file with links so
you can read about your op­tions and then click on the right one. And
it in­cludes other com­po­nents that help you work with your TeX
sys­tem.

Unix-type sys­tems, in­clud­ing GNU/Linux:

The best choice here
is TeX Live, which
con­tains many pack­ages and pro­grams. It is freely avail­able over the
In­ter­net or on disc; see the web page for de­tails. Note that most Unix
sys­tems have TeX as an in­stal­la­tion op­tion so you might al­ready have
it or be able to eas­ily get it us­ing your sys­tem ad­min­is­tra­tion
pack­age man­age­ment tool: RPM, or DEB,
or what­ever.

Mac­in­tosh:

Get the MacTeX dis­tri­bu­tion,
which is TeX Live with some Mac-spe­cific good­ies.

Steps be­yond: know where to go

As a TeX user you will have many re­sources to help you get
your work done.

First, TeX is pop­u­lar and there are prob­a­bly many peo­ple near you who
have ex­pe­ri­ence with it. There are plenty of help­ful peo­ple on the
In­ter­net dis­cus­sion group
comp.text.tex.
And, you are most wel­come to join a users group.

There are many books
avail­able. The
English FAQ is au­thor­i­ta­tive, clear,
and up to date.